Plasma waves guide the space weather of the upper atmosphere, including the radiation belts. With the increasing number of assets orbiting the Earth in these regions, interest in plasma wave dynamics has grown. For example, applications such as radiation belt remediation (wherein damaging enhanced radiation levels are reduced by controlled precipitation of energetic particle populations) have spurred recent research. Satellite missions to measure these phenomena in situ are an integral part of these efforts.
Plasma wave signals span a broad range of powers (over 120 deciBels, dB, where a deciBel expresses a range as ten times the difference between the logarithms of the largest and smallest values) over a broad bandwidth (from 0.1 Hz to 1 megahertz, MHz, where Hertz, Hz, is a cycle per second and 1 MHz=106 Hz). Furthermore, they evolve dynamically in time (often on millisecond, ms, time scales, where 1 ms=10−3 seconds). To capture as much of this signal in situ as possible, instruments are needed that cover broad ranges of sampling rates, durations and dynamic range under conditions of high radiation.